


Bliss is an Abyss

by noeon (noe)



Category: Wicked Gentlemen - Ginn Hale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 18:03:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noe/pseuds/noeon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things worse than pain. A peaceful life in the country, for one, and an honest man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bliss is an Abyss

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snowynight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowynight/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, snowynight. I found your letter and posted kink meme inspiring. I hope you enjoy this small vision of their time together after the end of the book. Many, many thanks to my beta, f, who gave me Wicked Gentlemen in the first place.

For the first few weeks in the country, we avoided each other. After our dusty arrival by carriage, Harper brought me in and washed the rain off of my skin. Mrs Kately had Giles bring up buckets of hot water for the narrow metal hip bath. Harper put me in it while it was steaming and brushed my skin with his hands, and if he strayed a bit further with the cloth than was strictly necessary for cleanliness, I certainly wasn’t complaining.

Afterwards we lay on a coverlet that was so clean and soft, it felt like a breath of wind. I could smell the mixed bitter citrus and heavy oils of the polish Mrs Kately used for the wooden floors, the rough tang of smoke from the fires mixed with the salt and leather of Harper’s skin.

There were so many strong smells missing from the city, I was overwhelmed by the delicacy of what was on offer. It disconcerted me, in its own way, the absence of filth and piss, of human and Prodigal stenches, of ore and charnel, of newsprint and rotting garbage. The distinct, verdant odours of the countryside were too much and yet far too little for my city-bred nose. Each scent was magnified until it was almost unbearable.

And then there was the light. The next morning dawned gold like a glory. The brilliant colours of the world emerged under rain and sun, more brilliant than the glass of the windows depicting angels and sinners. The world washed into a pale haze of sparks, and I hid in the library until dusk, drawing the heavy velvet curtains and immersing myself in the half-light of leather and paper. And again the next day. And the next.

Harper went out with Giles and worked on the estate. He came in late in the afternoons, deliciously fragrant and red-faced, taking long gulps of water and eating thick slices of bread and spiced meats prepared by Mrs Kately. We would dine later; our suppers were always cold, taken alone together at a small table in a side room. The large burnished formal dining table was too much expanse, almost as wide as a dark sky. I did have fantasies of all of the things Harper and I could do to each other on it, but I wasn’t keen to eat off of it.

I was always late to join him at the small square table with the heavy, rough hewn chairs. Sometimes I considered not coming, but I always did. Otherwise we lived two separate lives, the halves of day and night, outside and within. Often I slept during the day so as to have more of the night, after Harper was sleeping curled pink and brown and soft, breathing rhythmically. I would slide my narrow hips out of his grasp, pull my trousers and shirt on and pad barefoot to the corner to curl in a chair with a candle flame and a treatise on demons and men. The collection of books on the lords of Hell and the Church was particularly fine--more than I could devour in a month, or even a year of reckless consumption.

And then there were the dreams, bubbling from the muck of my skull, the blurred vision and thickened heartbeart of pursuit, always chased by assailants I could not see. The dizzying vertigo of dropping from great height that left me shaking and awake until dawn. Something in the quiet brought my terrors out, and it was a rare night I slept more than a handful of hours at once.

“Belimai, are you happy?” Harper asked me one late afternoon. A Tuesday I think. I was sketching the remains of a mouse skeleton I’d found in the barn. He’d come in early from the fields and reeked of thick loam and deliciously sharp sweat mingling with the smell of old words.

I licked my pen, tasting the slight bite of ink on my tongue, and concentrated on replicating the articulations of the miniscule spine. The scratch of my nib was loud between us. Harper knew too well to doubt that I heard him, but I enjoyed making him wait, in everything, making him lean in and say it again, exposing him in the openness of his own bold questions.

His soft hand, gloveless and calloused now in unfamiliar places by the work repairing and maintaining the estate, curled around my shoulder. “Belimai.”

I let the point touch my lips again, for a moment, then frowned at him. “It’s not in my nature, Harper.”

His lips grazed mine, soft tongue slipping between my lips and I tasted the garlic of his lunch and the rough wine he must have shared with the men he called in for ditch digging. When he drew back from me, there was a tinge of black across the pink of his mouth, ruining it. I wanted to lick it off, to sink my sharp teeth into the plump, stained curve of his lip.

“Yes, but are you?”

I took a long breath and let my pen sink to the paper. “Yes, of course. How could I not be? This is a sort of paradise.”

“How you can possibly say that with such downcast expression?” A furrow appeared between his golden brown brows. The sun hadn’t kissed his skin as much as it’d nipped it, leaving him ruddy and shining in the half-light.

I looked properly at him then, catching his concern, the slight pressure of his teeth in his lip. “As I said, it’s not in my nature. If this is happiness, it’s something like having a stomach ache.”

He smiled and swooped to find my lips, clever hand already opening the buttons of my shirt. “Happiness is a stomach ache. Whatever pleases you displeases you, contrary thing.”

“Exactly.” His hand trailed across my chest, teasing the hard nubs of my nipples, running a nail along the hollow of my gut. When it burrowed beneath the loose fabric of my cotton trousers and closed upon the root of my prick, I gasped. “Except that.”

His stroke picked up, sure and knowing, brutal in its solicitous efficiency. He brought me almost into arching forgetfulness, but stopped short.

“Lie down.”

I stripped my clothes wantonly like a two-penny whore, trailing cloth weighted with fastenings behind me, slouching with loose hips to the large leather sofa and laying myself out like an offering of flesh and defiance. His eyes burnt upon me.

I expected many things, but I did not expect him to kneel and to trace, first with his fingers, then with his tongue, the etched, scarred letters of my skin, speaking the words, forming them with his mouth upon me, sanctifying through the act of adoration. What was torturous and annihilating, agonising and brutal became liquid, hesitant, then flutteringly, gorgeously supple in his tenderness.

In Harper’s arms I felt almost good, almost beautiful, almost magnificent. It was more than I could bear.

“Fuck me,” I said, to say something crude, to spoil the moment of his skin upon mine.

His lips met my shoulder blade. “Shhh.” And his mouth continued its slow, careful descent on my back.

I was caught on the horn of dark and light when he did enter me, suspended between the half-light and the shadows, the softness of his body on the scars of my past. The penetration ached, the spirals of want curling through me punctuated by the sharpness of his thrusts.

“I- I-” He held my hips and stuttered, moaning, trying to speak in the unintelligibility of our enfleshed desire.

“Don’t say a thing,” I warned him, my nape prickled with foreboding.

His seed spilled warm and quick, rushing into me as my own shaking took, congealing into long clenches of forgetfulness. “Belimai.”

My buttocks were slick with his desire, our skin sticking together. He rolled to press against the back of the sofa, his limp flesh leaving me. His arms surrounded me, holding me close, pulling me from the sofa’s edge.

Eventually he burrowed his nose into my hair and I squirmed. “I do you know.”

“I do,” I said with a yawn, almost on the edge of clear sleep for the first time in weeks. “Know, I mean.”

Oblivion stole in on mouse-shaped feet. Together, in our dreams, we were alone.


End file.
